Читать книгу Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors - Shlomit Editor Kriger - Страница 21

George Scott

(Read at a 2006 ceremony by the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Holocaust Wall of Remembrance at Earl Bales Park in Toronto, Ontario)

Forever will you live, in our dreams and in our prayers,

in our imagination, and in the whisperings of hope!

Words, words, that is all we have

To bring out, to drag out, to talk about the dread

Words that erupt, feelings so basic they cannot wait to be pressed

Into words

Such is our deep and anguished cry for our Massacred Innocents

It is one week to the day many years ago

When the first “Selection” inside the Gypsy Camp took place

This diabolic act marked Birkenau’s Rosh Hashanah,1 1944

Dislodged multitudes transfixed

Six o’clock “Appell”2 in Birkenau’s Gypsy Camp

Naked bodies, five deep in a row, stood waiting, hoping for reprieve

Breath suspended as if held by vacuum

Tall, chest out, the light faded from sunken eyes

To the back of us, on the other side of the tracks

Squat and rectangular behind a wooden fence, only the top half seen

The gas chamber’s red brick chimney’s insatiable flames

Between barbed wire, electrified geometric enclosures

Look-outs, “We see you” Guard Towers, built into the fence

The “Zwillings” or “Twins” on one side of us

On the other side, bald, shaven women, striped like us

Mothers, daughters, starved, faded, beyond reach

Rats the size of small dogs, most active at night

In one of our barracks, on the “odd number” side

One-hundred concrete holes, back to back, to sit on

Three circular wash basins, metal rings, eighteen inches off the ground

When stood on, chlorinated cold water poured

Spray that brought me back to life

The only place in here for us to drink

Entering, on the left, on wooden shelves, no shortage of soap

Stacked unwrapped, RIF stamped on them, in ample supply

They were pasty grey like death

No way, not “Pure Jewish Fat” we are now assured

Like echoes in an infernal cathedral

The sound of Mengele’s3 boots approach

They halt, closer they draw

The unstoppable beat of our numbed lives

Quickens in our chests

The dividing encounter

Eyes seeking eyes, light seeking light

Piercing steel grey eyes, a prodding look,

A tired face, a pair of steel grey eyes

I scooped up my clothes and scurried

To the group where he motioned me to go

A fresh lungful of Silesian air housed my panic

Another shameful, ignoble day crowded into eternity

Panic and horror, pictures cannot describe

The sparks of G-d within us all

Prompt me to remember our voiceless outrage

I did not look a while, although I knew

Toronto’s Yad Vashem stands here

Not merely a monument and warning

But the live hopes, our own parts

Innocent souls still demanding justice

Martyred beloved ones

Holy, Holy, Inextinguishable Lights

We shall remember you always

You continue showing us the way

As long as thought leads to thought

As long as spring follows spring

We shall remember you!

You are alive in our dreams and in our prayers

In the resolve of our better judgement

In flights of our imagination

In the sparkle of our children’s eyes

In the whispering of hope

1Jewish New Year.

2Appell is German for “roll call,” when camp inmates were forced to stand at attention while they were counted.

3Josef Mengele was a German SS officer and a physician at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced labourer. He also performed medical experiments on camp inmates.